Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Nicole Shanahan

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Nicole Shanahan is an entrepreneur and fellow at Stanford’s Codex, where she developed AI for law and government. Born and Raised in Oakland with the help of government assistance. She excelled at school, earning degrees in Asian Studies, Economics, and Mandarin Chinese and a law degree from SCU. Nicole was a player in the rise of Silicon Valley’s golden age, and her philanthropic work focuses on healthy reproductive longevity, childhood wellness, and regenerative agriculture. Relevant links: https://kisstheground.com/ https://commongroundfilm.org https://www.buckinstitute.org/focus-areas/female-reproductive-longevity/ ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton. I love to read philosophy, and I love to read about the philosophy of the ancients in particular and what has survived from ancient philosophy. So I tend to find a writer or a thinker, and then I'll go through as much of their work as I can consume. You know, seven years ago, I was really into Aldous Huxley. And prior to that, I was into Emerson. And then prior to that, I was looking at female writers in Rome and the first woman who ever wrote a dialogue

was in the 1400s. And she wrote a dialogue on the infinity of love. Her name is Tullia de Argonne. And then right now, I'm reading a lot of Peter Kingsley, a philosopher from the UK, who has done a marvelous job helping his readers understand where logic and reason comes from in Western civilization. And he looks at pre-Socratic notions of logic and reason and the initiation

process of receiving logic and wisdom. And a lot of it is quite divine. There's this element of connection to the sacred, and there's no difference between the connection to the sacred and logic and reason. It's actually one thing. And he teaches that Parmenides and Empedocles, who were the earliest fathers of Western civilization, they brought forward logic and reason from Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. And he talks about why that matters, because Persephone is where life on earth comes

from and if life on earth comes from the same place that logic and reason comes from and nature comes from the same place logic and reason comes from then perhaps they're the same thing. And the impact that has had on me today, you know, looking at the age of AI is that we need to look to nature as our source of guidance on how we go about framing AI's purpose in our world. Our world is a natural world, and we're going to have to find a way to integrate that and the technology that we now have permeating every aspect of our life. How did you know Huxley was seven years ago? Honestly, there was a lot of energy around psychedelics in Silicon Valley at the time.

And Aldous Huxley came up many, many times as being one of these great philosophers. And so I had started reading him, and I remember it was seven years ago. That's when some of my friends around me were starting to talk about these medicine journeys, and it was all very new to me at the time. And so then I went about reading Huxley instead of doing the medicine journey because I wanted to meet them where they were. Great. The doors of perception.

Yes. Lifting the veil. Do you use social media? No. I tend to use Instagram privately to stay connected with my friends and family. I've attempted to look at Twitter and TikTok a few times, and I find that it works at a different cadence than I like to process information.

I like to look at something as a complete picture versus sound bits. I like Medium. I think Medium is a really great platform. And I read news publications by certain journalists that are doing more of an investigative approach to their journalism. How did you meet Bobby Kennedy?

I'm a lifelong Democrat, and I initially came across Bobby Kennedy in the press, and I read about some of the things the press was saying about him. And it was not positive. It was definitely not framed in a positive way. And I kind of just tabled it at the time. And then his name came up again in a conversation I had with another Silicon Valley mom who has a child affected by autism. And she said, look, you got to really just listen to him, to understand him. I was like, yeah, you know, but like I'm a lifelong Democrat. Like, we have a party.

I know he's running in the primary. I'll take a look, but there's, I haven't seen anything yet that would motivate me to take a deeper look based on what I've seen in the press. And she was like, just promise me you will listen. So I listened to, I think it was his podcast. I was listening to his podcast and I listened to a few episodes and what struck me was that what they were saying about him in the press was not how he was talking about some of these issues.

And he was really talking about environmental health and safety and, you know, big pharma and corporate capture. And what I was reading about in the press was, you know, he's an anti-vaxxer, this is dangerous, and it's unqualified information. And so that was the first kind of, hmm, there's a really big difference between what is being reported versus what I'm hearing from the primary source, this, you know, this individual. I was also at the same time reading a lot of scientific literature. My daughter was diagnosed with autism in 2020.

How old was she at that time? She was 18 months. How did you even know to check? So she wasn't speaking and she wasn't pointing. And we had already had a situation where, you know, at around 10 months she wasn't crawling and her muscle mass seemed very weak. And so I was taking her to PT. She ended up walking though around one years old. And so I was like, oh, you know, this, I think whatever that was, it's over. And then by the time she was 18 months, she was not just non-verbal, but she wasn't really connecting. And when she was born, she was very, very healthy and smiled and giggled

and grabbed and hugged and had great eye contact. And then there was this like slow like fade. And at this point, it was unfortunately, it was the pandemic. So we did most of our assessments over Zoom. And it was very confusing to me that you could diagnose autism over Zoom. But she was, she was given an autism diagnosis. And what they recommend at that time is to seek an intervention in the form of speech therapy typically, speech ABA. Sometimes they recommend OT or PT. is to seek an intervention in the form of speech therapy, typically. Speech ABA, sometimes they recommend OT or PT for us. It was speech.

And so I brought in a speech therapist, but nothing was working. Like, there was no amount of speech therapy that was going to increase my daughter's speech, and it just seemed like we were putting her through hours and hours and hours of this. So then I was like, I need to understand medically what autism is. And I started about three years ago on this really deep dive into every publication, every related publication, every indication,

every clinical trial I could get my hands on. And it was actually Jack Cruz that made me realize that perhaps there was something related to the way that the brain was responding to some kind of outside influence and how to heal the brain. Jack Cruz talks a lot about melanin restoration. And I had actually just read a paper about where, you know, the vestibular system is in the ear because at that time, I was getting my daughter going with OT because they believe that when you stimulate the vestibular system, you stimulate the brain and that can result sometimes in the development of speech.

What is OT? Occupational therapy. You know, you take your child there and there's oftentimes a gym set up and they'll have your child swing and jump and roll and move and that moves their vestibular system. And so in a podcast I was listening to with Jack Cruz roll and move and that moves their vestibular system. And so in a podcast I was listening to with Jack Kruse, and again, I don't know if there's any relationship, but it did trigger a different course of action for me.

He says that the largest store of melanocytes in the body is in the inner ear. And I thought to myself, okay, the vestibular system, melanin, melanocytes, melanin is like the screen that receives photons. Those photons then get taken into mitochondria. Mitochondria have a function of providing energy, but also signaling to the cell and can be part of the healing process. That made me think completely differently about autism,

that there was the vestibular system working in tandem with this healing process, and you could heal the brain into overcoming some of these symptoms of autism, then maybe my understanding of what autism is is wrong. Because my understanding at the time of autism was that it was a behavioral disease. Because all of the interventions are behavioral interventions. Treating the behavior. The symptoms. Yes. The symptoms.

And this group of people in Silicon Valley, they're really smart. They come from these very important jobs and they have children that are affected and they have been coming together, trying to figure out medically what autism is. And initially I had been somewhat resistant to it because I didn't wanna put my child through these

huge medical tests and I didn't want her to have to go through arduous MRI screens. So I had initially been resistant to even accepting the narrative that autism is a medical disease versus something that is treated just behaviorally. And so it took me a while to come around to it. With Bobby Kennedy, I needed to have a conversation with him to understand why he was coming from the place he was coming from. And in my first conversation with him, which was last summer, it became clear to me that this was somebody who has spent their career looking at this and their career looking at the environmental exposures

and the things that impact human health that are man created. And interestingly, at the same time, my scientists that I had funded to study fertility were coming up with similar information. And they were finding that environmental exposures were reducing human fertility and impacting female reproductive health in significant ways. What were some of the things that would have impact on that? The environmental issues. Yeah.

So the big categories are endocrine disruptors, chemicals. So chemicals in our products, chemicals in our water, chemicals in our fertilizers that we then ingest through our food. And other disruptors are really electrochemical in nature. In fact, the WHO is working on a research paper right now on how non-native electromagnetic fields impact fertility. There's good proof that they do. And another one are medications. So medications impact our cellular biology

in significant ways, and some medications more than others. And in that category are vaccines. And it's hard to say that today, right? And I hesitated for a while to even mention it with friends because vaccines are such an inflammatory topic right now. Why do you think it is? You know, science requires us to question things. Science requires us to not accept anything as an absolute truth. And it is confusing to me that we have accepted that vaccines are writ large, safe, and they're the right path forward 100% of the time. That's not what science would ever say if it was, you know, true science. Like true science always requires us to ask, well, but what about this circumstance or that

circumstance or, you know, what if we test it and look at it this way? Or we've seen certain indications, let's go investigate. That's what true science is about. So the fact that we can't question vaccines as being responsible for certain, you know, chronic diseases or certain injuries is something today I am comfortable talking about because I am such a lover of science. I do believe that asking the question is part of the scientific process that is due at all steps of drug development and discovery of human health. So I feel comfortable asking that question now,

but I don't think most people do. Have you had any improvements based on what you learned about the brain side of things versus the symptoms? Yeah, I have learned so much. So I'm actually funding the first clinical trial in photobiomodulation and autism. It's registered, you can find it. It's at the University of Texas being led by Professor Francisco Gonzalez Lima, who's a lifelong mitochondrial guru. Like he really understands the mechanisms of mitochondrial health as it relates to healing. You know,

he's actually on his way, but I'm still involved and watching and hopeful that we'll see results. But just separately in my own home, I've tried to find ways to help my daughter's mitochondrial health set her up for healing. And there's this wonderful professor also, a mitochondrial expert in San Diego, Robert

Navio, that's written a whole review piece on something he calls cell eugenesis, which is the Greek word for healing process, healing cycle. And he maps out a huge number of chronic diseases, and he maps out the healing process for each of those diseases. And he's very, very well respected, but his science is not mainstream science in the sense that it's what's governing drug development today and medical treatments,

but it is very, very good science. And it's not clear how we commercialize that science entirely, but it does prove that the more you support the body towards healthy stasis, the more you support the body's ability to heal, the more likely an individual is to overcome symptoms and certain chronic diseases. That's always been the case though. We know the body heals itself. Doctors may give you something to help support the body healing itself, but the body heals

itself. Yeah. It's very interesting when you frame it like that because there's so much truth to that. We heal when we sleep well, we heal when we eat well, we heal when we feel loved, and we heal when we feel seen and heard. I do think bioenergetics is an interesting part of science. I mean, I can't let that go, right? Like I'm a technologist, I love science.

And- And it's interesting, you know, and if it works, it's great. Exactly. And I've been looking at the healing cycles. Well, let's look at a field of science that wants to innovate in healing. And this field of bioenergetics is fascinating because it is all about finding

interesting ways to augment the body's healing support structure. More even than that is how to prevent future disruptions to the body's healing cycle. So how do we stop subjecting our bodies who are working really, really hard to heal themselves? How do we subject them to these things that are disrupting that process? So in our home, we do a lot of, you know, trying to figure out how to design our home in a way and design our lives in a way that reduce those exposures

and create an environment really hospitable to healing. Yeah, tell me what they are. That sounds like a great way to live. Yeah. You know, water is important for humans. Water has been really important for my daughter's healing. And like I changed from a chlorine pool to a saltwater pool.

And I have my daughter swim while the sun is still rising because as the sun rises, the wavelengths are a bit longer. I'm no expert in this, but they're easier for our bodies to absorb. And the light from the sun is incredibly healing. And it's almost like morning sunlight in particular is like chicken soup for metabolic health, for mitochondrial metabolism. It's just a wavelength that our body can take in, make use of, spread to the cell in a very elegant, gentle way.

And I think that's what kids need when they're healing, is that morning sunlight. They need that exposure to salt water, which is very helpful, or water in general, because water has a way of magnetizing that light. And then her bedroom, I try not to have any electronics in it. She, you know, currently doesn't use screens because we find that the screens seem to cause her distress. And so I try not to be on my phone or have my phone around her. And again, these are complicated biological pathways

that I don't fully understand, but what I do understand is that, you know, non-native light sources get absorbed by our body as well, and those non-native light sources can disrupt our cellular metabolic health. And I see it. I see it in my home. And so we try to remediate any non-native light sources as much as possible.

We try to remediate various cellular and Wi-Fi systems, and we do our best with that. And then interestingly, music, there's actually quite a few studies on music and autism. And I know this is your world, but there's certain frequencies that do heal the body or modulate brain activity in a way that sends a signal to brain cells that they can repair and that it is this harmonious stasis of repair. And so we have this music box in our, I'm laughing because I'm such a hardcore technologist and scientist that, you know, sometimes some of the things I buy are from these sites that, you know,

I look at and I'm like, is this real science? But it works. And when it works, and you know, maybe we need science to catch up. And I think that's where I am right now. Well, if you think about how people have been attracted to and moved by music forever, people are attracted to and moved by the beach and the ocean. It's like all the things that you're talking about

as things to change to make your house more like, they're more like the true pleasures of life, historically. Yes. Yeah, and they're pleasures of life that unless you allow yourself to understanding that these things are connected to some design of our biology, right? And that maybe even if we haven't published on it yet scientifically, that there's something there. And we have to trust our intuition to go and invest in those scientific inquiries.

It's not abandoning science. It's not abandoning truth. It's not becoming a hippie. People will say these things, right? They're like, ah, that's just the hippies. But like, you know, maybe there's something to it. And so that's a scientific inquiry that I'm really interested in pursuing.

Well, it sounds great because the worst thing that you find out is that it doesn't work. If you found something that didn't make sense, that helped your daughter, great, it helped. I don't know that we can always know how things work or why they work. Yeah. And that's the beauty of discovery is that we are smart enough to prove these things out. We are smart enough to run the double-blind studies. We are smart enough to build consensus.

What is not smart is saying that this is the absolute of how something works and anybody else that does it any other way is wrong. Unfortunately, I see it more often than I don't now. And my daughter has lifted the veil for me, going back to Aldous Huxley. And, you know, if we're talking about my support for Bobby Kennedy, that is what has brought me to this movement financially, spiritually, and perhaps other ways.

I do believe that this is more than a candidate. I believe that there's a movement at hand and that movement is very scientific. It's very much about asking questions that are hard questions to ask. And everything we've just been talking about, taking these indications of what works and what doesn't work, and then investing in the science to explore it deeper. That's what Bobby Kennedy is about. And that's why I've come around from where I was before

and have aligned with it. I was already aligning with it through my foundation, and I was already aligning with it through even my venture capital fund, and I was aligning with it through even my venture capital fund. And I was aligning with it in my home. So it only makes sense to align with it politically right now. LMNT. Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best?

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perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolyteste LMNT. Explain intellectual property to me. Intellectual property represents a well-recorded corpus of the spirit of human innovation. And it's a series of documents that we've collected here in the United States for over 200 years of ideas and aspirations and solutions to problems.

And it's been something that has been a window into learning and seeing how we've evolved as a species. Give me examples of what's considered intellectual property. You know, legally it's divided into copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I've spent most of my career in patents, and within patents there's an extra layer of division. There's agricultural patents, there's design patents, and there are utility patents. And so my primary focus throughout my career was utility patents and the way that it's described as, you know, adding novel utility to the human experience. This microphone here in front of us,

this has probably hundreds of patents that go into the way the sound leaves my mouth, goes through the padding on the microphone, gets picked up electrically, all of the electrical connections of sending these, you know, bits of information through into the computer. Each step is a novel invention and patents have been written covering each of those steps with excruciating detail.

And that is what builds innovation. That is the fabric and the foundation of how the Western world thinks about innovation, is through these incremental steps. And the patent space and being in patent law is about recording each of those steps very, very carefully. If someone invents something new, how do they research whether there's ever been anything like it before? So historically, before computers, you would go to the patent office just outside of DC, and you would go into the catalogs and rifle around the catalogs, and you would go through these things called art unit numbers. So the way the United States Patent and Trademark Office is organized is that they've tried to

create a massive taxonomy of how the world of human innovation is organized and each of those unit numbers has a series of examiners and they're all responsible for examining each new patent. examiners and they're all responsible for examining each new patent and those patents then get published. Today, it's about 18 months from the date of filing and once it's published, it's public record and anybody can go in and sift through. Today, luckily, we have all kinds of ways to do that. There's databases that are published from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And, you know, I spent my career actually trying to figure out how to make that process more

efficient. And when I was, I was in my mid-20s at the time, and I was looking for all of these novel ways of searching the patent corpus and trying to figure out the best, most efficient way to go through, you know, hundreds of patents a day, because my job was trying to figure out how to cluster these technologies and help companies and scientists and innovators quickly understand the landscape analysis of all of these inventions, some of which, you know, have roots that go back over 100 years old. So understanding that entire timeline of innovation that leads to your novel invention is something that I spent quite a bit of my career doing. When you were doing that job, where were you working?

What kind of a company was that? I started my career at various patent prosecution firms working directly with inventors. And then that evolved to working at a company in San Francisco called RPX Corporation. And RPX was trying to create the first patent exchange. RPX stands for the Rational Patent Exchange. And it was there that I realized that standard forms of databases were just going to be too

hard to navigate given the complexity of the technologies we were working with at the time. It was LTE 3G and we were going into 4G and then 5G. And these were massive, massive patent portfolios, tens of thousands of patents. And it was that experience that made me realize that we needed a very powerful search tool. And that attracted me to the world of artificial intelligence. And new to the field, there was logic-based AI and then there was machine learning-based AI. And there was a group at Stanford, a real motley crew of people and they were calling themselves legal technologists. This is in 2009 and by the time I had found them it was 2013 and I said I think I've invented

this AI tool to help us manage patents but it's not good enough to search patents and they said well you should join us because that's what we're trying to figure out too, is how to take all of these words and figure out the right set of computational tools to use them for legal purposes. And I joined them at Stanford and it was called Codex, the Center for Legal Informatics. And it was there that I started learning about large language models. And at the time, large language models

weren't even an acronym today. You hear LLM floating around everywhere. But for me at the time, it was, we just called it language models. Was there already a legal technology world prior to this? Not really. We would try to find each other, but literally just handfuls of individuals

that all had these crazy ideas that the future of law was really going to be computational. You know, there was some interest. LexisNexis has been around for a while, and they've provided software to lawyers for decades. And it was pretty basic software and there are various systems called docketing systems. Historically they were just databases and you'd be able to do these queries to look up cases and information about your cases and track client records.

And so that had been around for quite a while. And in fact, those systems were the ones that when I was working at law firms, I was responsible for managing and keeping up to date and cleaning up and trying to make sure it didn't break or there weren't bugs. And these systems are actually really important. In fact, there's requirements, ethics requirements, that the law firm keep these records up to date. So if these records are somehow corrupted or the files are corrupted, that can pose a massive problem for the law firm and for the clients as well, resulting

in pretty big consequences. Were all the people in this legal technology group all lawyers? For the most part. All had been through law school in our group and all had had some practice experience. And I think all of us were the nerds at the law firm that were tasked with managing the software systems. And I think that what brought us all together was just the general pain that these systems were causing, you know, a choke point for so many of these practices.

And some of my other work, I have a minor in economics, and I study a lot of transaction cost theory. And I was like, if we're spending all of this money on administrative tasks, that's time not spent on delivering legal services. And so, part of why I went into law was I love justice and I love delivering service that helps humanity. And I was like, man, these transaction costs

are really killing that process, because it would literally stop a law firm in its tracks like, man, these transaction costs are really killing that process because, you know, it would literally stop a law firm in its tracks when a file would get lost or the software system was down. Were you always interested in the technology side? I think technology represents efficiency in transactions. And I think what that means is that it's a useful tool, a very powerful tool to bring service to people

in an efficient way and reach more and more people. And so when people ask me about like the power of technology or technology as like a core skill to advance oneself in the world and STEM is so important. I actually disagree. I think that technology is a wonderful tool, but it's not the thing, right? The thing is the spirit of humanity and the spirit of human potential.

And so for me, that's what it's always represented is, is how can we use technology efficiently with heart and with grace to help advance the human potential? So the technology supports the mission. It's not the mission, it just supports the mission. Technology is not the mission, that's really well said. But it is very important to the mission. When you describe the way patents work in the United States, are they global patents

or are they only for the United States? How does the global aspect of patents work? Yeah, so we have a unified system that was created through a treaty, and those are called PCT patents. And each country, for the most part, has a national track for getting a national patent. There's been some efforts to create an efficiency around how to file in multiple, multiple countries,

but every country has its own independent issuance system. So there's the United States path, China has a patent office. I actually worked in Beijing, working at a Chinese patent law office for a little while after college. And Europe has both national systems and a European system. EU patents they've attempted to,

and they have done a really nice job actually creating a pan-European patent system. But each country still maintains its own office. So if you get a patent accepted in the US, if there's someone who has a similar patent in another part of the world that already exists, would you know about that? Through search it would come up. And in fact, there's a private path for patent searches, and then there's also a government path

for patent searches. And each country before issuing a patent has its own search process. There's search and disclosures. You're actually required to disclose any conflicting, we call it prior art. Are there cases where the same patent exists in two different parts of the world with two

different people? Yeah, you know, there's a lot of overlap in certain patents, and that oftentimes will lead to these invalidity challenges. Without one of those challenges, those two patents could actually theoretically just exist side by side in perpetuity. But in the instance that there is a challenge, and usually those challenges are due to some underlying commercial motive, then those two patents will be challenged side by side.

Tell me about your first job. So I was 12 years old in Oakland and I was very passionate about work. And it was in large part due to the economic challenges my family had. And I said, I'll just, I'll work, I'll get a job, I'll figure something out. And most of it was, you know, due to the fact that I just, I wanted to have my own spending money. And I didn't want to ask my mom for help.

She was already really taxed just putting food on the table and gas and keeping the car running. And so I went door to door in this town near my house called Montclair and I literally went door to door restaurant, business to business and I said, can I work here? And you know, some of them looked at me and they're like, he looked kind of young. Well, here's an application. Good luck. And then there was one burger joint in Montclair at the time called Flippers and they were

just very understaffed. You could tell there was just unclean tables and people running around and I could hear yelling from the kitchen. And I was like, may I have a job? He was like, can you start now? And I was like, oh, yeah, I can. And I just started busing tables there right away. And that was my first job.

And I stayed there for a little while and then I moved to a different restaurant a few years later, and I was front of the house helping people. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best in class templates. With the built-in style kit you can change fonts, imagery, margins and

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The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. What was your experience of school like? I have loved school since pre-K. I've loved every aspect of school and I just found it to be such a place for expression and getting to know people. And I love the schedules and the order and that there were these things you could learn

and express and write, and that the teacher paid attention to you as you went about your journey through the classroom. And I just found school to be a place of great peace for me. Do you think that that was in relation to your home situation? Oh, yeah, probably. I think I would have liked school either way

just because I'm a curious person, but definitely home was a hard place and definitely lacked consistency and predictability. My dad had real challenges with alcoholism and my mom was struggling to keep food on the table, get us to school, and then she was also going to school herself a lot of my early childhood. Yeah, so being for me to go to school was a chance to kind of just enjoy the structure of it all and to have the opportunity to explore in a nice safe way. Do you know how old your parents were when they met?

Yeah, my mom was 28. She had, they actually met in carpool, believe it or not. My mom immigrated to the United States in 1983 from Guangzhou, China. And they met because she came over on Deng Xiaoping and President Carter's policies of bringing young professionals to study at U.S. universities. My mom was an accountant. So she came over, landed in Oakland, because that's where her sponsor was, and needed a way to get to school and met my dad who was also, he was 27 at the time,

and he was on this carpool list, and they met in carpool. And then you mentioned your dad had problems with drinking. Was that your whole life or did it change from early life to later life? You know, it was my whole life and I think, you know, my dad also grew up in Oakland and I learned more about him in the last few years because I've done quite a bit of healing work around that. And he was part of this generation of boys, you know, who was told at a young age that, you know, boys can't have feelings. And I believe what happened was he never had a chance to fully feel and process his feelings and that was very hard on him. And sadly, like so many young men, I think without that

expression, that can become quite a hard, toxic environment emotionally. And so going to alcohol was my father's way, I believe, of dealing with that. Do you have brothers and sisters? I have one younger brother. He's two years younger than me. And we, yeah, we kind of helped raise each other. I'm really proud of him.

He's actually getting his master's in social work right now at Denver University. He's a real good guy. Tell me about the house you grew up in, the neighborhood. My father and his younger sister grew up in Oakland. And when I was born, he was really trying to have a career as an IT professional. And so I was born in Roseville

and they were living in a condo at the time and they were really struggling. And so they decided to go back to Oakland to the house he was raised in, my grandparents' house. And that's the house that I was raised in as well. So I grew up in the house that my father grew up in and my grandparents were very gracious in allowing us to live in that house.

How long before you were born, did your mom come to the United States? My mom had been in the United States for just under two years by the time I was born. She and my dad fell in love and it was very passionate. And they really wanted to get married and they did and and nine months later I was born. Did your mom ever talk to you about the culture shock of coming to a new place? All the time. So one of her

first memories is leaving the airport, arriving into Oakland, and looking around. And she was like, did something happen? Where are all of the people? Where are all of the outdoor shops? And you know, like what's going on? Was there like, did something really bad happen? It took her a few weeks to understand just how different, you know, Guangzhou, a very, very busy Chinese city, like how vastly different, you know,

the American experience is. And, you know, she initially came here and lived as a live-in caretaker for an elderly woman in Oakland while she was going to school. And, you know, she came over with not a lot of money. And so that was her way of covering rent expenses. And I think her experience in America was she learned about America through movies and mostly Harrison Ford movies. And

she had dreamed about America as she was a very, very little girl. And so coming to America for her was everything she had ever dreamed of. Going to school, getting a job, falling in love. I mean, for her, it was just a magical time. Have you been to Guangzhou? I have a few times. Did you ever get to go with your mom? I have, yeah. Tell me about that.

We went when I was in college, and we did one of those packages packages and my mom wanted to, because they're very affordable, but we found one of the packages that stops in Guangzhou. And we went to Guangzhou and when we got there, my mom actually hadn't been back since she left. I think she went to Hong Kong for a wedding once, but she hadn't actually made it back to her hometown. And we were walking around and she actually didn't recognize where she was.

She was like, I recognize that bridge, but nothing else is the same. Because China had built so much in such a short amount of time. They had built up all around this neighborhood that she had grown up in. And she said it was virtually indistinguishable, but she could still see some walls and some indications of places that she had recognized from when she had grown up there. What was your first job after school? My first job after college was,

I was really curious about China actually. And I wanted to go and study and understand Chinese intellectual property law. And this was in 2007 and 2008. The Olympics were to be in China in 2008. And I had just done a big study abroad program while in college where I'd stopped in China. And during that stop, I had gone around and I was like, I need to find the Chinese intellectual

property law firms here because this is where I want to come once I graduate. And I had gone online. Thankfully, the internet was a pretty navigable place at that point. And I went online and I made a list of all of the patent law firms and there were three. There weren't many. And then I went door by door trying to find Chinese patent lawyers who would talk with me. And I actually ended up meeting this wonderful man, Jali Xu. And Jali happened to also be the government's highest ranking intellectual property advisor. And so he spoke great English. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I ran into him.

I ran into him in the hallway and I had my resume and I said, I really would love to come and learn from you when I graduate. And he was like, huh, you know, I don't know. I don't know, like, what are you gonna do? And I was like, I will sort your files. I will write your emails in English. I will do anything, you English, I will do anything

to help your practice. And he was like, you know, actually that would be really helpful. My English is good, but it's not so great. If you want to come and help me be like an international liaison for a year, that would be wonderful. And I said, okay, we're a done deal. And I went home and I told my family and they all thought I was kind of, you know, they were all worried. And they were like, all right, well, we've never been able to tell you what to do. So I guess you're going

to do it, right? And I said, yep, I'm going to go do it. And right after graduating, I actually did a quick summer program at the WTO trade law in Geneva for a few months, got a certificate, and then I went from Geneva and I flew through Qatar to get to Beijing. I had never been to any of these places. And I was by myself. I had a packed bag. I had a few thousand dollars in my pocket that I had saved up, and I just landed in

Beijing. And how was that experience? Beijing in 2007 and 2008 was an amazing place. The energy of China in 2007 was so extraordinary because this was prior to the Olympics, it was this huge debut that the entire country was getting ready for and it was very open. And if you were a young professional,

there was so much for you to do and learn. And there was this vibrant, vibrant expat community. And there was this bookstore in Beijing called The Bookworm that was run by an American woman. And I would go to The Bookworm on the weekends and just sit there in this expat community. And we would just talk about China. We would talk about how exciting it was that it was open.

And sadly, I've heard the bookstore is no longer there, but it was before things got politically tense. And it was a wonderful, intellectually stimulating, curious, open-hearted, exciting place. open-hearted, exciting place. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers.

Macadamias, a rare source of omega-7, Linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias. Art-healthy and brain-boosting fats. Macadamias. Paleo-friendly. Keto and plant-based. Macadamias. No wheat. No dairy. No gluten. No GMOs. Keto and plant-based. Macadamias.

No wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs. No preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar. House of macadamias. Thigh roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate, coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash tetra. Where did you do your year abroad? So I did my year abroad.

It was a backpacking trip and it was called the PACRIM study abroad program at my university and they ran it every three years and it was led by a Buddhist scholar. And so for nine months, you weren't allowed to come home during those nine months. You only could bring what you could fit in a backpack. And we moved from site to site throughout Asia. And our first stop was Mongolia. And in Mongolia, we were tasked with tracking the long-horned Argali sheep and learning about their migratory patterns and studying how the Kashmir trade was interrupting it in deep central Mongolia. And it was during that time, because the director of my program was also a Buddhist scholar, we studied ancient Mongolian religion, shamanism, and we had a chance to meet with Mongolian nomads and to live with them out

on the Mongolian steppe. And so that was our first stop. And other stops from there, we went to India, all over India. We went to Mysore, India. I lived with the Tibetans in exile in Dharamsala. We went all around Bangalore as well to see how tech was booming through Bangalore. So we got flavors of all of India on that trip and it was spectacular. Oh, I lived at a Buddhist monastery in southern India for a few weeks too. So cool that you got to have those experiences when you were young. And you were able to follow your curiosity, but it wasn't like you were a successful person or didn't come from a wealthy family.

Like you really got very lucky that you were able to have these experiences that are so exotic and so difficult to come by. Yeah, yeah. You know, and the U.S. university system really does provide that opportunity because I didn't need to pay any more tuition for this trip. It was the same tuition that I would have paid had I stayed in Tacoma, Washington, where my university is based. And these were extraordinary adventures. They were not luxurious by any measure.

I was sleeping on, you know, pretty basic mats most of the time. And they kind of, you know, put the trust in us students to stay safe. There was certainly not too much handholding. We had to get around on our own. But they were extraordinary. And, you know, when I talk to young people today who say, well, I can't afford to travel,

and I'm like, why? Well, let's look at it. And I'll literally sit there and start looking up plane tickets and hostels with them. And I encourage it. I encourage young people to go explore, because it's in that exploration that you find out who you are. How many were in your group? There was 20 of us total.

It sounds great. It was amazing. It was amazing. It was transformative. So the first job was in Beijing. And then what motivated you to come back? Or was that always the plan? It was always the plan. And you know, a year in Beijing was very exciting.

And the plan was to take what I learned in Beijing and apply it to the other side because there was a lot of curiosity in the early 2000s about how to safely transact intellectual property with China. And the popular opinion in the United States then was you have to be very careful. You can't, you know, the Chinese intellectual property system is still very young. It's very unpredictable. You know, if someone quote, you know, replicates your invention without your permission, there's not a lot you can do about it. And so I felt that once I had built that community in Beijing,

I could go back to work for a US patent law firm and help them navigate that environment. And I did. I helped cross-pollinate patent filings with my former employer in Beijing at every other law firm I worked at. Do you know the status of those connections now in terms of, if you were to do that job today,

would it be the same as it was when you were doing it? No, it's so much has evolved since then. We live now in a world where intellectual property is such a big part of commerce that had it not evolved, we wouldn't be able to do the kinds of deals that we're doing at the scale that we are doing them now. One example is just manufacturing of electronic devices. Much of that is based on trust from bilateral mutual respect of intellectual property. And it's not perfect by any means, but from where we were then, we have come so far. And I do think that innovation is one of the strongest tools for healthy diplomacy in many ways. And, you know, if you can cross license and transact and be partners in the development of new technology, you often will find above that a government system that supports it.

And so that's where we are today. And I think that going forward, there's going to be even a greater understanding of what that looks like as we enter this AI age. Artificial intelligence is going to force us to work together, because we have to. It will force us, because it is a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful technology, and it poses very big risks. What are some of the risks? There's a number.

One is that the AI is only as intelligent as how it's trained. And we're seeing that already at play, that some of these tools will give you answers that are really lacking substance behind them. And if the results of AI are being presented as truth, it's going to require humans to go in and understand and verify what the sources of those truths are. And many AI systems don't provide a proof that is available for the consumer.

And in order for us to conduct ourselves in a world in which we are relying on AI to provide a truth, that proof that we accept as being the source verifier, we are going to have to come to consensus on what that looks like and we're not there yet. And actually, interestingly, Stanford Codex, the group that I had gone to work for after law school and that I'm still affiliated with as a fellow, their focus right now is how to build ethics into AI. And there aren't many efforts going on right now on the planet dedicated to this, but I think it's the most important thing we should be investing in is getting together multinational groups to talk about AI ethics. It's doable and we've seen what it can look like.

You can design these humanistic verification systems that work in tandem with these AI tools, but those are going to require us to really focus on what that means. And it's going to take some very, very serious coming together to agree on those standards. Well, we don't agree on the standards without AI, so it seems like agreeing on them in AI seems difficult. It's definitely a difficult but not impossible endeavor. What are AI ethics? There's various camps of thoughts of what that looks like.

You know, ethics as a field exists. Hank Greeley at Stanford Law School is a great ethicist. And as a profession, ethics has continued to evolve with humanity. It hasn't gone anywhere. It hasn't been written off as being a soft science that we don't need in the age of technology. It's here.

It's very much intact. And I think one of the ways we can accomplish this is taking the professional ethicists and bring them into the field of AI. And we've seen some efforts around that. The challenge is that how do you take ethics and make it computational? And computational ethics is what will result in the regulation of AI eventually. That's how we get there. We take pockets of these professional thinkers, bring them into a computational AI group,

and that computational AI group is what then translates into the regulatory bodies that oversee AI. Do ethics represent what we aspire to, or what is now? It's certainly the checks and balances of looking at where we are with innovation and coming together and really thinking deeply about is this ethical, is this right, is this in the best service of humanity?

And the law has actually been an incredible source of reference because it tests ethics through the judicial system all the time, because many of our laws are based on that very same exercise. And so ethics is both something we aspire to, but it is in the fabric of humanity. It's in the fabric of Western civilization. It has always been aspired to, and it is something that carries with it a spirit that translates generation after generation. And I think that the translation that we are feeling today is the feeling that we need ethics to catch up to where technology is.

Do we witness ethics at play in nature? Nature is the ultimate source of all logic and reason. It is where life comes from. Life is deeply logical. It's deeply ethical. Nature relies on energy in a way that is very fair. It takes what it needs to do the task that it's genetically made up to do. And nature is remarkably resilient, as is ethics. I actually go to nature to check my own thinking on many of these issues. I oftentimes will take my shoes off and go sit next to a tree or lay in the grass under the sunshine.

And interestingly, in recent years, I've been spending a lot of time trying to understand how nature works and how human biology interacts with it through some of the work my foundation does. And there's a profound scientific structure governing nature that is so efficient and so transactionally fair. What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry?

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Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. You had several jobs in law offices after coming back, and then what was next? Well then there was Stanford and they hired me to come on as a residential fellow to work on building the first AI patent lawyer. And so I spent two years at Stanford, you know, running around campus between the law school and the computer science department because my center was joint and trying to figure out how to bring the best and the latest in computational capacity to patent law. And I built a company called

Clear Access IP during that time. And Clear Access IP was initially going to be an AI powered patent management tool. And then it really turned into a way to use to look at the patent corpus and create a whole bunch of research resources. So one of our research resources was we built a huge molecule database of every molecule ever discussed by humans and registered as patents. And then, you know, it was actually also at Stanford that I had this coming home experience. I was approached by someone in Kamala Harris's office, actually, who had worked with her and was in charge of technology for her office when she was an AG of California.

And he approached me and he asked if I would be willing to help with a project with the San Francisco DA's office. And so I split my time between this project for the SFDA, helping them computationally review several thousand police reports because there was a blue ribbon panel dedicated to looking at these police reports because the police officers who wrote these reports had been identified as participating in a coordinated kind of text chat and in that text chat there were just very overtly racist statements being made. And so they wanted to make sure, and I think this effort was very good, they wanted to make sure that

there was no bias in their policing as a result of that. And they didn't have the tools to do it. And so they came to my department and they said at Stanford and they said, you guys are the only computational law academic group who can do this. Can you guys do this for us? And I said, yes. And what came from that? What did you find out?

So what came from that was we did notice some inconsistencies in how the reports were written, and we outlined those in a report that we provided to the SFDA. George Gascon was the DA at the time in San Francisco. And when it was made aware that this was happening, he then was like, well, if there's a way for us to detect bias in these police reports, we want that upfront as well. And I was like, wow, that's very interesting.

I would love to work on that as well. And so we delivered the report to the Blue Ribbon panel. They had gone through it and they had identified all of these cases that they wanted the DA's office to review again because several of these individuals were still incarcerated. And so they went back and they were re-reviewed them and it did progress many of those cases forward in a way that I actually didn't get a report back. I had only heard from the chief of staff there that it was helpful in them really thinking about

for those cases, re-reviewing them, making sure that anyone still incarcerated was not wrongfully incarcerated. And then more broadly, they said that they wanted to make sure that there was a way to implement policies going forward that would be able to detect these irregularities. It then resulted in me, as a philanthropist, a year later, setting up the Stanford Computational Policy Lab with Professor Sharon Goll, which has now since moved to Harvard. But while at Stanford, they came up with all of these tools that various district attorney's

offices had employed. And one of my favorites is actually this tool that they were able to automatically redact any words in a police report that would indicate an individual's race, sex, or age. So that tool has been implemented in a few places. When you started the IP company, how did the idea come to start the company? So, ClearAxis IP grew from a project I had worked on at RPX in which we were looking at the portfolio of Nortel at the time. Nortel was a large Canadian wireless company and they had about 40,000 patents that were being auctioned. And that auction required a turnaround of evaluation of that portfolio very quickly.

And doing a patent valuation analysis is very expensive and very timely and costly, and it takes a lot of smart people because you need experts in the technology and then you also need patent lawyers. And RPX had me managing the pieces of the portfolio of like, what are the patents, what do they represent, how do we categorize them? And then let's bring on the experts and get them all reviewing through those pieces of portfolio. And we did it almost all manually.

And we had to turn it around in, I think it was less than two months. And I was working, you know, 18 hour days at that point. And so the valuation that was produced through that was pretty far off of what the value of the portfolio ended up being. And it was off by, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars at the time. And it wasn't like a travesty. It was just like, well, that was the first bid, right?

It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't like a travesty, you know. It was just like, well, that was the first bid, right? It wasn't a big deal, it wasn't. But it had me thinking that like, if a group of buyers were willing to pay hundreds of more millions of dollars than what I came up with as like a starting price for the portfolio, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And, you know, separately, I was still managing

the portfolio from like just database standpoint, and that still required manual entry. And I was like, there's so much manual work that goes into all of this, and there's got to be a way to automate it. So that was the genesis of ClearXSIP, was how can you both manage in real time using AI to manage these portfolios, and then simultaneously, how can you value them in real time using AI to manage these portfolios and then simultaneously, how can you value them in real time? Because technology is very amorphous. And so we created a tool to try to figure out how to do real time valuation.

What's the status of that company now? So I sold the company during the pandemic in 2020. And so Clarex's IP was the AI for a larger company called IPWii and IPWii has grown. And I believe the latest is that they're going through another restructuring. I mean, the AI that we had built and sold was early, right? We're just now doing LLMs for chats and searches. What we were trying to sell was an AI lawyer.

And so I think, you know, it was very early and where it is now is that it's actually being restructured and put into another tool. But the industry is ready for it now, whereas in 2018 it really wasn't ready for it. So it's still evolving. I was going to say it seems like the legal profession would be slow to embrace new technologies in general. It seems like a very old-fashioned profession. Yeah. I had a judge write to me after I'd published a piece called The Transition to

Legal AI Will Be Slow at First and Then It Will Be Sudden. And the judge wrote back this really poetic piece about Hamlet and how he was a Luddite and could barely bring himself to enjoy a player piano. You know, I think that that part though was right. And the article I wrote for the Daily Journal, it has been very slow to adoption. But I think given where AI is today and the influences that, you know, certainly open AI has had on the field is that moment of sudden adoption is happening right now.

How did you meet Sergey? We met in 2014 at a yoga festival and we became friends. And then when I started my job at Stanford, he loves Stanford, gosh, this seems like so long ago, but he would come and visit me at my office. Our first meeting actually was very funny on campus because I was sitting in a cafe that had cartoon caricatures of all of Stanford's top grads, and I happened to just sit under the caricature of him and Larry.

And he came to say hi and he pointed at it and he said, my teeth aren't that big. And I looked up and I was like, oh my. What was your experience of the Google culture that you got to witness compared to other places that you've got to see? You know, I really was in Silicon Valley during its golden age and its rise. And that was around 2008 to where we are today. Certainly there was a lot of energy prior to 2008, but there was something that happened

that was astronomic in Silicon Valley. And being around that, even at Stanford, it's kind of one community, Silicon Valley. It's not just like there's Google. It's Google and Stanford, like it just mushes into everything around you. It's part of the culture in cafes that are in downtown Palo Alto. It's part of the culture of Sand Hill Road, which is where all of the venture capitalists

are and people flock literally from all over the world to Sand Hill Road to meet investors. And so the culture in Silicon Valley is move fast, break things, fix those things, and move fast again. That worked for a while culturally and economically, but it's not really working the same anymore. And I see Silicon Valley going through this big cultural shift. And it's not an easy shift, but it's an important shift because we're in a completely different chapter of Silicon Valley than of the Silicon Valley of the last 15 years. Why do you think it is? What changed? I think what changed is how powerful some of these companies have become. From my perspective, being an academic at Stanford, being an AI professional, having

been married to a founder of a very large tech company, I think that change is being mandated by how integrated technology has become in people's lives. Technology has found its way into nearly every corner of an individual's day, such that I don't even know that the average person has any idea of when they're not using technology. That division, that boundary, it's been completely wiped out. It's ubiquitous. It's completely ubiquitous. I find it personally troubling. I think that, you know, from where I came

from, technology was a tool. It wasn't life. And now technology is life for many, many people. And I don't know that that shift, it kind of happened in almost a slow, insidious way, and not necessarily by intention. It's just, it happened. Tech got good at doing what it does. And that overtaking of the human experience by tech is going to make tech and Silicon Valley understand its responsibility for people's lives.

There was a story I read about a law firm that used an AI tool to create a brief that was used in court, and the example that they gave, the AI made up. It was a fictional. Yeah, and that's why we need, you know, really strong verification tools that are being provided in tandem with the output of the AI. We laugh about that story at Codex at Stanford. Because that's a little bit of the moral hazard of AI. That it makes things up? We don't know if it's making things up. We trust it. Yeah. Well, if you trust it, then beware. Exactly.

And that's the moral hazard. We assume that these really smart people are making this stuff, and therefore it's right. But the reality is that there's going to be errors, and there's going to be really big errors. And unless we have ethics and verification helping us get through that layer of error, we're going to create so much chaos in the world if we jump into AI too quickly. Thank you. you